Tabs have always been one of the most useful elements of a user interface, allowing an interface designer to pack a lot of information into a small space by only showing a section at a time. This article explores the implementation of a tabbing interface using HTML and JavaScript, and goes on to look at pages where more than one set of tabs is used at the same time.

It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen: you're deploying a PDO-based PHP application to a shared host, and they don't run PDO. If you can't reconfigure the server, you can always wrap MySQL to look like PDO; that's what NotPDO does.

If you've ever needed to know which country is at UTC+3.5 (it's Iran), or who is responsible for administrating the Western Sahara (that's Morocco), it's all in here. List is also available in SQL, for such situations as a 'select your country' dropdown on an e-commerce Website.

The most common problem that people encounter when using AJAX is that they can't update more than one region of a Web page at the same time, since the request only comes back to fill one region. Using JSON, it's possible to update multiple regions at once, and it's even possible to run inline JavaScript in the AJAX response, automatically. The magic behind it is explained here.

The current crop of programming languages tend to frown upon the use of pointers, deeming them to be unsafe for everyday work; indeed, many languages ban their use altogether. C# is different: it is possible for a C# program to delve into pointers, but there are caveats. An example is given in this article, using a graphical bitmap effect driven by pointer arithmetic.

Version control systems and development testing servers go hand in hand; you work on your local working copy, and test on the development server. But what happens when you want to take your work live: to deploy the developments you've completed? This article presents one way to solve that problem, by using the scripting facilities provided by Subversion.

The first script that a budding PHP developer builds is often a tool to send simple email messages from a website, with a couple of paragraphs of text inside. What these scripts lack is the ability to send HTML-formatted emails, or to attach documents and other files to the message. In this article, I cover the MIME standard for building complex emails, and how to format and send a MIME-compliant email message in PHP.